Dolphin and all those other random Android browsers WebKit?
Quite a few of them are yes, just wrappers around the built-in Webkit. Only Mozilla and Opera have their own rendering engines on Android. (Firefox for Android/Fennec and Opera Mobile)
There was a very preliminary port, but Mozilla abandoned work when Apple made it clear they wouldn't allow Firefox on iOS. For jailbroken phones, here's a repo maintained by a volunteer.
Mozilla is a community project with only a part of the actual contributors being paid devs. They are indeed paid to work on stuff where the open source community is less interested in, like Windows integration. So yes, this is probably indeed what is happening, but you make it sound like it's a bad thing, by calling it a "fuck you" whereas its more of an "I know you can do it better anyway".
That said, I suspect this one is due to technical reasons, like there being much more desktop environment fragmentation which makes integrating something like this a mess on Linux.
So please tell me, how does one generically "install" an application on "Linux"?
It's silly to complain about Linux not being supported when Linux itself doesn't support the basic concept. It will probably be up to the distribution vendors like Ubuntu to customize this for their own desktop environment.
They're proposing this because the other "solution" they announced obviously totally sucks (but they have no choice).
To pretend this is only Opera's problem is silly. It's an everybody-who-is-not-Webkit problem. Which is why Mozilla said they will do the same, and if Microsoft ever gets any mobile devices out, they'll have the same problem.
Free software is here. We've won. The strict rules of the GPL aren't necessary because people are willing to create, use, and propagate free software without them.
Citation needed.
GPL3 focuses on anti-tivoization and patents. According to your reasoning, that's not needed because companies are voluntarily allowing their users to hack their devices, and they're not patenting software? You must live on another planet. Without an axe to wield like the GPL, free software is dead in 5 years. It's annoying so many people are just so incredibly naive, or corporate brainwashed, in this regard.
A sheep's way of saying "I don't like what you say".
Not really, your post was just incorrect bullshit. SFC doesn't start suing for software they don't own the licensing to, unless they are hired by the copyright holder.
If you don't care what your users do with your software, there's little point in using the GPL.
I don't understand why the editors even post such crap. The comments are supposed to be stupid here, not the articles themselves!
Do Not Track was a feature *introduced in Firefox and promoted by Mozilla*. Every browser ended up implementing it, and last of all Chrome did so grudgingly, mostly because Google didn't want to be the only one not to have it. Whether it's effective or not I'll leave up to debate - I prefer to use Ghostery myself and not rely on sites to cooperate. Call me cynical.
The second paragraph of the article is entirely a troll: the "have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife type questions that has no good answer" turns out to *have* an answer, it just didn't fit the viewpoint of the poster, who doesn't want to acknowledge that.
I think you really need to read up on what free software is. Paying for a patent license is completely incompatible with making your software free, because the freedom (the patent license) cannot be passed on. That's why the GPL2 is incompatible with it and why the GPL3 even aggressively retaliates against it.
That's also why Mozilla, even though they can easily afford to pay the H264 license for all Firefox users, has taken an "over my dead body" stance on it. If they include H264, it is no longer free software, and things like Iceweasel, Pale Moon, Ten-Four etc must cease to exist or are forced to be half-assed versions.
You can contrast this with Chrome, where Google doesn't give a shit that the open source version (Chromium) is crippled compared to the closed source one. But even they have stated that they'd like to get rid of the split. But they can't. Why?
You are completely and utterly wrong. Firefox doesn't bundle H264 exactly because it *is* free software in the GPL sense. There's no way for it to include patented technology.
Go to about:config and switch network.http.spdy.enabled.
Mozilla has been quite critical of some Google technologies (Dart, Native Client,...) that it saw as not truly open and closing down the internet to be the GoogleWeb. SPDY got implemented though. So I guess it's a a keeper and might see wider adoption.
I worked at Netscape back in the 1994-1996 timeframe, and I knew some of the people who did very well in the Netscape IPO then went on to Mozilla. They've apparently changed. I guess it's okay to be enterprise-hostile after the enterprises have landed them a huge paycheck...
I don't get your argument. Mozilla isn't Netscape. I'm guessing the people that went from one to the other did so because they cared about the product, not because they subscribed to the corporate philosophy. The income structure of Mozilla in 2011 has little or nothing to do with what the one of Netscape in 1995 was!
The crashes aren't uniformly distributed. Far from it. If you hit a problem case, it'll crash 10 times a day. If you don't, it'll run for months without an issue.
As you already observed, extensions are the main problem makers, and that's true for all browsers.
My point is that corporations, not home users, are the ones paying the Mozilla Foundation's bills and payroll
Nope. Absolutely not. Mozilla is payed for by users who run the browser and click Google ads. Some of these run Firefox because that's what their corporation gives them. If you look at adoption numbers, 3.6 is now down to 4%. So the people who pay Mozilla are overwhelmingly home users, or corporations that didn't have any problem with updating it.
It seems to be that 4% that makes a lot of noise and demands that everything else is held up while they get their act together. That isn't going to happen. But apparently that 4% is big enough to make the ESR versions.
It has known memory leaks that are fixed in more recent versions (some big ones in 4.0 already). And people always complain it uses a lot of memory. *sigh*
Some minimal research would have shown that Firefox releases for Windows are compiled with MSVC 2010 in PGO mode. Not the Intel Compiler. There is absolutely nothing in Firefox that cares what brand your CPUs is. It runs even on ARM.
Slashdot Mirror
Dolphin and all those other random Android browsers WebKit?
Quite a few of them are yes, just wrappers around the built-in Webkit. Only Mozilla and Opera have their own rendering engines on Android. (Firefox for Android/Fennec and Opera Mobile)
There was a very preliminary port, but Mozilla abandoned work when Apple made it clear they wouldn't allow Firefox on iOS. For jailbroken phones, here's a repo maintained by a volunteer.
https://github.com/redpanda321/Icefox
Mozilla and Google pay millions of dollars to be the default browser on many computer systems.
I don't know what Google does, but Mozilla does no such thing. Their finances are fully open, you can check.
Mozilla is a community project with only a part of the actual contributors being paid devs. They are indeed paid to work on stuff where the open source community is less interested in, like Windows integration. So yes, this is probably indeed what is happening, but you make it sound like it's a bad thing, by calling it a "fuck you" whereas its more of an "I know you can do it better anyway".
That said, I suspect this one is due to technical reasons, like there being much more desktop environment fragmentation which makes integrating something like this a mess on Linux.
Updates to the browser are provided in a .DEB file, easy to install
At least in Ubuntu you get Firefox updates automatically. Clearly easier than getting .deb files.
So please tell me, how does one generically "install" an application on "Linux"?
It's silly to complain about Linux not being supported when Linux itself doesn't support the basic concept. It will probably be up to the distribution vendors like Ubuntu to customize this for their own desktop environment.
They're proposing this because the other "solution" they announced obviously totally sucks (but they have no choice).
To pretend this is only Opera's problem is silly. It's an everybody-who-is-not-Webkit problem. Which is why Mozilla said they will do the same, and if Microsoft ever gets any mobile devices out, they'll have the same problem.
...and some vendors (mostly Apple, a little bit Google) have an interest in that not happening. So good luck waiting.
Free software is here. We've won. The strict rules of the GPL aren't necessary because people are willing to create, use, and propagate free software without them.
Citation needed.
GPL3 focuses on anti-tivoization and patents. According to your reasoning, that's not needed because companies are voluntarily allowing their users to hack their devices, and they're not patenting software? You must live on another planet. Without an axe to wield like the GPL, free software is dead in 5 years. It's annoying so many people are just so incredibly naive, or corporate brainwashed, in this regard.
A sheep's way of saying "I don't like what you say".
Not really, your post was just incorrect bullshit. SFC doesn't start suing for software they don't own the licensing to, unless they are hired by the copyright holder.
If you don't care what your users do with your software, there's little point in using the GPL.
Only as far as resources permit.
Slashdot even covered that; http://games.slashdot.org/story/11/06/29/1824253/worlds-best-chess-engine-outlawed-and-disqualified
Looks like the editors have a short memory.
That's why it's so unnecessarily hard to change the default search
Click search box. Select alternate one. Done. That was hard
I don't understand why the editors even post such crap. The comments are supposed to be stupid here, not the articles themselves!
Do Not Track was a feature *introduced in Firefox and promoted by Mozilla*. Every browser ended up implementing it, and last of all Chrome did so grudgingly, mostly because Google didn't want to be the only one not to have it. Whether it's effective or not I'll leave up to debate - I prefer to use Ghostery myself and not rely on sites to cooperate. Call me cynical.
The second paragraph of the article is entirely a troll: the "have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife type questions that has no good answer" turns out to *have* an answer, it just didn't fit the viewpoint of the poster, who doesn't want to acknowledge that.
The original article seems to be totally ignorant of the fact that Do Not Track *was introduced by Mozilla*.
Google was *the last one* to add it, because they hate it, of course. So no, Mozilla doesn't give a shit what Google thinks.
Also, Chrome is *not* open-source. Chromium is.
Chrome/Berkelium doesn't allow you to make a fully usable GUI, let alone look native. It was never meant for GUI toolkit work.
XUL/Gecko do - it was a designed as a GUI toolkit from the beginning, and it's what powers Firefox and Thunderbird.
I think you really need to read up on what free software is. Paying for a patent license is completely incompatible with making your software free, because the freedom (the patent license) cannot be passed on. That's why the GPL2 is incompatible with it and why the GPL3 even aggressively retaliates against it.
That's also why Mozilla, even though they can easily afford to pay the H264 license for all Firefox users, has taken an "over my dead body" stance on it. If they include H264, it is no longer free software, and things like Iceweasel, Pale Moon, Ten-Four etc must cease to exist or are forced to be half-assed versions.
You can contrast this with Chrome, where Google doesn't give a shit that the open source version (Chromium) is crippled compared to the closed source one. But even they have stated that they'd like to get rid of the split. But they can't. Why?
Because patents.
You are completely and utterly wrong. Firefox doesn't bundle H264 exactly because it *is* free software in the GPL sense. There's no way for it to include patented technology.
Go to about:config and switch network.http.spdy.enabled.
Mozilla has been quite critical of some Google technologies (Dart, Native Client, ...) that it saw as not truly open and closing down the internet to be the GoogleWeb. SPDY got implemented though. So I guess it's a a keeper and might see wider adoption.
I worked at Netscape back in the 1994-1996 timeframe, and I knew some of the people who did very well in the Netscape IPO then went on to Mozilla. They've apparently changed. I guess it's okay to be enterprise-hostile after the enterprises have landed them a huge paycheck...
I don't get your argument. Mozilla isn't Netscape. I'm guessing the people that went from one to the other did so because they cared about the product, not because they subscribed to the corporate philosophy. The income structure of Mozilla in 2011 has little or nothing to do with what the one of Netscape in 1995 was!
Everyone knows the next version after 3.6 is called 2012.
The crashes aren't uniformly distributed. Far from it. If you hit a problem case, it'll crash 10 times a day. If you don't, it'll run for months without an issue.
As you already observed, extensions are the main problem makers, and that's true for all browsers.
My point is that corporations, not home users, are the ones paying the Mozilla Foundation's bills and payroll
Nope. Absolutely not. Mozilla is payed for by users who run the browser and click Google ads. Some of these run Firefox because that's what their corporation gives them. If you look at adoption numbers, 3.6 is now down to 4%. So the people who pay Mozilla are overwhelmingly home users, or corporations that didn't have any problem with updating it.
It seems to be that 4% that makes a lot of noise and demands that everything else is held up while they get their act together. That isn't going to happen. But apparently that 4% is big enough to make the ESR versions.
Except FF3.6 doesn't suck.
It has known memory leaks that are fixed in more recent versions (some big ones in 4.0 already). And people always complain it uses a lot of memory. *sigh*
Some minimal research would have shown that Firefox releases for Windows are compiled with MSVC 2010 in PGO mode. Not the Intel Compiler. There is absolutely nothing in Firefox that cares what brand your CPUs is. It runs even on ARM.